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When I first joined LinkEngineering, I had just left my teaching job as a middle school science teacher at a Catholic school in Chatsworth, CA, and was getting ready to enter into UT-Austin’s STEM Education PhD program in the hopes of better understanding how to structure and develop a quality engineering education for our pre-college youth. During this time, I was reflecting on my teaching practice, particularly the few engineering design projects I had my students do. To give a sense of what these projects were like, they included things like: re-engineering a shoe for improved performance in a particular sport, designing earthquake-safe buildings, and developing concepts for a bio-inspired robot. At the time I was teaching and implementing these projects, I had very little exposure to engineering-education literature and research, and was really just trying out some intuitive ideas of what could be constituted as design projects in the hopes of making the science content I ...